Watch An AI Demolish A Pro Player At Dota 2

Using games for AI research has become fairly common in recent years, as DeepMind are using StarCraft II to develop sophisticated routines and algorithms. Not to be one-upped by the developer who made the game they adopted a mod of, Valve showed off OpenAI's (Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup) own intelligent bot by having it beat the snot out of a pro Dota 2 player.

At this year's Dota 2 International tournament, Danil "Dendi" Ishutin, one of the game's most famous mid-lane players, went up on stage to play against an OpenAI's bot, which apparently learned the game itself and does not mimic the movements of another player. The one-versus-one mid-lane match was no contest, as the bot trounced Ishutin. According to OpenAI, the bot also went undefeated in several rounds against Syed "SumaiL" Hassan and Artour "Arteezy" Babaev, both from Evil Geniuses' Dota 2 roster.

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Valve then opened the bot up to attendees at the tournament, who could challenge it for the chance to win one of 50 Arcana-grade items (the most rare and expensive in the game). All 50 were quickly awarded, as players found ways to confuse the bot with untraditional strategies, such as attracting the enemy wave of creeps away from the towers they fight over and having them chase you around the map (this leaves your allied creep wave free to attack the enemy tower, the destruction of which leads to a win). So, as in all man-vs-machine stories, just do something really weird and the robots won't be able to deal with it.